It has been a superbly active week in terms of placements and skilling initiatives in the country. IIM’s have been in news for bagging lucrative packages and wrapping up placements, early and efficiently. Six IIM students from the Ahmedabad and Kolkata campuses have been offered a lucrative package of Rs 44 lakh or gross of tax Rs 66 lakh, plus discretionary performance-related bonuses. IIM Ahmedabad witnessed participation from 125 companies and wrapped up placement for its batch of 378 students. Another revelation has been that IT companies in an endeavor to focus more on user experience along with functionalities, are actively offering higher salaries to designers as compared to engineers. On the other hand, an Aon Hewitt's Annual Salary Increase Survey reported top performers in 565 companies will take home an average increment of 15.3 per cent this appraisal season, even as pay hikes across these organizations remain a muted 10 per cent, the lowest since FY09.

Skilling also picked up a lot of traction this week with, The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, a UK-based chartered professional body, introducing a new membership qualification Certified Actuarial Analyst for individuals. In addition, CII Kerala decided to extend a helping hand to senior women professionals to become company directors by providing them adequate training. Benchmarking education on a global scale, the QS World University Rankings, placed four Indian universities, including the IITs at Delhi and Mumbai, among the global top 50 in at least one of the 30 disciplines covered. Surprisingly enough, China has emerged as world’s no.3 preference as an education hub after US and UK and for India MBA is still the most preferred choice for a postgraduate course.

Amongst the appointments and movements, the most prominent were Craig Wimsatt being hired by Bharti Retail, Salil Nair joining as the new CEO of Shoppers Stop and Sanjeeb Chaudhuri being appointed as the CMO and Group Head of Brand in Standard Chartered. Extending a work-life balance support to employees, a lot of organizations are now easing out their leave policies by allowing employees to buy, sell or cash out their leaves.